Halloween Safety Tips for Kids – The Halloween 2012 Safety List

Scares for Everyone!

Remember when you were a kid? The excitement of dressing up as your favorite character and spending the evening trick-or-treating from door to door? Halloween is one of the best days of the year for a child, but for the fun to stay fun, you have to make sure to keep everybody safe. Here is a list of some of the most important Halloween safety tips for kids.

Plan Adult Supervision

Make sure there is an adult with younger kids at all time. Kids can get lost at night, or worse, and the mere presence of an adult to keep everybody in a tight pack will really add to everybody's safety.

Visit Halloween Friendly Homes

Not everybody likes to give out candy and treats to lil ghosts and goblins on Halloween. Usually, houses will signal that they're "open for business" by leaving the porch lights on. If you want to play it doubly safe, you can only visit homes that have decorations out in the front yard. This makes sure you don't make the neighbors angry and cause any unwelcome confrontations.

Stay Visible

Remember, all of this is happening at night, and there are still cars out on the road. If your kids don't have a bright costume, have them wear a reflective strip or some other type of reflection device so they can be easily seen by headlights.

Don't Go Inside

Make sure your kids know that they should never go inside somebody's house. Candy can just as easily be distributed from the porch, and there's absolutely no reason to ever go into a house. This is important for children who are thirteen or fourteen, and who may be trick-or-treating without an adult.

Check the Candy!

Perform an inspection of all of your kids' candy before they eat a single piece. Check to make sure all the wrappers are tightly closed, and discard anything that looks like it might have been opened or tampered with. There are a million horror stories about "fixed" candy given to children on Halloween, so we don't need to go into any of them here. Just make sure you do a thorough investigation of anything given to them by strangers.

Halloween

Get Candy!

Map Out a Route

If you aren't going out with your kids, map out the route you want them to take through the neighborhood, so you have an idea of how long it should take. Make sure to let them know that they have to be back by a certain time, and only map houses that you know are going to be safe. If in doubt, always go by rule number one – adult supervision.

Have Fun!

Last but not least, don't forget to let your kids have fun! Remember, this is Halloween, and your children will want to act a little devilish. Plan for snacks and scary movies back at the house when all the little costumed horrors get back from their night of pillaging.